Don’t mistake iteration for game design

This is the fourth in the series and the subject is discipline, meaning whether you iterate or you build systems. The first three described what the work is, this one is about who can do it.

This is also why a product person thinks they are a game designer. They pull D1 retention up by five points and take that for a design decision, but they won those five points inside a game that already existed, and what that game would be had been decided long before.

The biggest reason mobile F2P feels solved is that the work is built entirely on iteration and testing. There is a number behind every decision, you can tie every question to a test, and the answer comes back within a few days. So somebody who stays there long enough starts to think the work has been solved. But being able to measure something does not mean you have solved it.

F2P rewards iteration and premium rewards building systems, so where you think you are changing platform you are actually changing discipline. PC F2P wants both at once, which is where a bad hire costs the most.

The F2P side is run by product people and that is the real basis of this split. The “mobile is a different job” argument always comes from product people. These people are genuinely good at building cause and effect out of numbers, and that is exactly the skill F2P asks for.

But because they have no design pedigree they mistake that skill for game design and introduce themselves as game designers. Iterative skill is something a good game designer should have anyway, a subset of game design. That is the half the product person carries, and the half they do not carry is the creative one, which is the half that decides.

A product person coming from Trendyol or Hepsiburada, Turkey’s big e-commerce sites, works very comfortably in mobile F2P and can call themselves a game designer within 6 months. They do the job well too, the real work there is iteration and setting that iteration up is genuinely their skill.

What is wrong is the title itself, and it only surfaces in two places. The same guy makes slop when he moves to the premium side, and he cannot build anything from scratch when the studio wants to move to a new game. There are plenty of examples out there and it is one of the things players complain about most.

It is not a one person problem either. Everyone on that team spent years optimizing the inside of a frame that already existed, and the question of what the game would be never reached any of them. Whoever drew the frame answered that question long ago, and everyone else works on top of the answer. When they want to start from scratch, what is missing is not talent, it is that they have never answered that question before.

This was always my complaint in mobile. Product managers coming from adjacent sectors would introduce themselves as game managers and try to teach us design without knowing game design 101. It was constantly “mobile is not like that, mobile is like this, mobile is like that,” all of it nonsense, they took the part they did not know from a 3 month company orientation and tried to dictate it to us. The PMs who do this get wiped off the market later anyway.

A developer working in mobile F2P usually does better at the appeal side, especially if they worked on a frontier like HC. Because the experiments there were like the wild west, you could try even the most ridiculous things. That is one of the reasons friendslop took off this hard, developers coming out of HC are a very good fit for making friendslop.

One of the fastest accelerating games after the genre formed also came from an old HC publisher. Dear Passengers was announced on 14 July, took 700k wishlists in the first 36 hours, passed 1M in two days and reached 2M within two weeks, making it the sixth most wishlisted game on Steam. The studio behind it is FLEXUS, their catalog is entirely mobile idle and hyper casual, Mow My Lawn 100M, Tower Craft 80M, Dye Hard 60M installs, and this is their first premium PC game.

But on the premium side, making games nonstop for the sake of sustainability burns the person out and therefore the team as well, and that tempo ends up focused on the short term, it does not bring a long tail either, what brings that is systems worked into each other with real craft.

When you look at the mobile F2P games that fly, you see that they are iterations of each other anyway, and however much they tell it like they discovered Mars, the evolution of the next iteration is usually obvious to good designers. The reason iteration is this easy is the game itself. Mobile F2P feels a bit like a slot machine and a bit like the continuation of other games, so producing variations on top of it is easy and stepping outside the established order carries very large penalties.

A game from scratch is usually found by accident too. The moment it is found the money rains down on it, the industry swarms there, and everyone starts over saying I made this.

The reason I say by accident is that many mobile giants have never found a second game. Everything King released after Candy Crush is a variation on Candy Crush, Soda Saga, Jelly Saga, Friends Saga. Supercell could not put out a new game for six years after releasing Brawl Stars in 2018, and Rush Wars, Everdale, Clash Quest, Floodrush and Clash Mini were all shut down in beta. Both are among the best in the industry and both get stuck in the same place.

To see how small a change is enough, Loom Games is all you need to look at. They took mechanics everyone knows and changed them a little with the design nerve they picked up in HC, Pixel Flow came out in August 2025, the company raised seed investment at a $36M valuation in January 2026 and a month later went to Scopely at a billion dollar valuation. Six months passed between launch and sale, and it was a twenty person team. Right now you can only find growth like that in the AI vertical.

The only creative part was that small change and it was worth $1 billion, which also shows how hungry the industry is for any kind of distance. And the way the money rained down was an exit again.

HC was really the frontier of being creative inside mobile F2P. But even there people tried to go through iteration. The big hits always came out of the creative side, the iterative side always stayed dull.

So it is not very surprising that this much investment, and even unicorns, came out of Turkey. As a nation we can perfect an existing design by brute force, you can see it most clearly in the knockoff makers, there is almost zero difference from the original.

Textiles are the same, we are one of the best manufacturers in the world and we sew the collections of global brands, but we are only strong in whitelabel. Les Benjamins is only now settling in, but looking at the whole picture, textiles has been one of our strongest sectors for years. I am not saying this to run it down, it is a genuinely hard skill.

But we have almost no international design house doing fully novel design. You will say TaleWorlds, Les Benjamins and so on, and you are right, but their being the only ones is the problem itself. Other countries have 10-20 of them.

This is not new either, in Ottoman times we did not discover America and set something up there, we tried to perfect the state system we already had. The phrase “a thousand years of state wisdom” does not get thrown around for nothing, even if it was also one of the reasons the Ottomans collapsed. The same holds in games, boutique work and design from scratch come hard to us, perfecting what exists through iteration comes easy. Mobile F2P is exactly where that skill is rewarded, and that is why Turkey exploded there.

When you look at a team or a CV, look at the work done, not the title. Has that person ever built a game from scratch, or have they always taken something that existed further. Both are valuable but they are not the same thing, and when you put one in place of the other the game is the side that loses.

Perfecting what exists is a genuinely hard skill and this country has plenty of it. What is missing is being able to build something from scratch and build the structure that forms a culture around it.